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# System prepended metadata

title: EESSI paper meeting (20210511)

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# EESSI paper meeting (20210511)

Call for papers: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/page/journal/1097024x/SPE-SI-HPC-1607014410373.pdf

Submission deadline: Monday **May 31st 2021**

Overleaf project (contact Alan to get access): https://www.overleaf.com/project/60993d67cfe5ee67c2fe2fe0

## Attendees

- Alan O'Cais (Jülich Supercomputing Centre)
- Kenneth Hoste (HPC-UGent)
- Thomas Röblitz (HPC-UBergen)
- Victor Holanda Rusu (CSCS)
- Bob Dröge (HPC-UGroningen)
- to invite
    - Terje
    - Caspar
    - Adam (review?)

## Follow-up sync meetings

- Wed May 19th 13:30 - 15:00 CEST
- Wed May 26th 13:30 - 15:00 CEST

## Attention points

- Need to make clear what is different to what CC did. Check their paper.

## Places to steal from

- Fenics proposals
- NESSI / S4
- CZI grant proposal
- FOSDEM submission
- Alan's writeup
- EESSI docs

## Structure

- Introduction: Problem statement + motivation [Kenneth]
    - community aspect
    - changing HPC landscape
        - x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, RISC-V
    - relevance to exascale? [Alan]
        - workflows
- Project overview [Bob, Kenneth, Thomas]
    - design choices
        - overall structure & layers [Bob](Creating note...)
    - software projects (CernVM-FS, Gentoo Prefix, EasyBuild/Lmod/archspec & co) [Kenneth]
    - minimal requirements for clients
    - build containers (Singularity)
    - "continuous" release of software layer
    - bi-yearly for compat layer?
    - deployment with Ansible/Terraform [Bob, Terje?]
    - testing with ReFrame [Victor]
- EESSI community [Kenneth]
    - How it started
    - Who's involved
    - Current structure
    - Lack of dedicated funding (bottom-up)
    - open source licensed, GitHub
- Use cases [Thomas]
    - HPC cluster
    - Cloud
    - Workstation [Victor]
        - WSL, macOS
    - Testing across different systems
    - Building software on top [Alan]
    - Training (cluster in the cloud, magic castle) [Alan]
    - might take some use cases from S4 proposal
    - Work together with software developers
        - review installations
        - how to assess quality of installation (correctness, performance)
    - Facilitate testing in CI environments [Alan]
        - mount EESSI in GitHub Actions
- Pilot setup demo [Bob]
    - 4 steps to get access in a Linux VM
    - focused effort: limited software, x86_64 + aarch64
- Discussion [Alan]
    - different CPUs (see intro?) [Kenneth]
    - limitations of CernVM-FS [Bob?]
        - risk of central setup (S0)
        - read-only
        - local disk (cache)
        - internet access (default setup, workaround possible) [Alan]
        - OS jitter
    - deployment workflow [Kenneth]
        - delay in adding stuff
        - workaround: build on top locally (temporarily)
    - security aspects [Kenneth]
        - separate section?
        - limit access to S0
        - signed tarballs
        - automation
        - transparency
        - layers of security
    - proprietary software (EULAs, build vs run) [Kenneth]
        - Intel, CUDA, AOCC, ...
    - vs containers [Kenneth]
    - integration with vendor libraries (cfr. Cray, MPI) [Alan, Victor?]
        - compatibility of host & EESSI MPI library
    - OS jitter due to CernVM-FS + workaround (NFS export of CVMFS filesystem) [Victor]
        - OpenFOAM as example?
    - impact on other project in terms of improvements, adoption, etc.
        - contributions to EasyBuild/ReFrame [Victor]
        - adoption of CernVM-FS/Gentoo Prefix in HPC [Bob]
- Evaluation [Alan]
    - benchmarks [Alan]
        - GROMACS (cfr. write-up by Alan)
        - scalable workload (OpenFOAM?) [Kenneth]
        - direct MPI eval: OSU (latency/bandwidth)
- Acknowledgements [Thomas]
    - Fenics
    - Dell
    - ComputeCanada
    - NESSI + Terje (contributions, Stratum-1)
    - UGroningen (effort + Stratum-0 + S1)
    - SURF
    - HPC-UGent 
    - JSC (testing)
    - AWS
    - Azure
    - OSU OSL
- Future work [Kenneth]
    - automation (CI/CD) [Bob, Kenneth, Terje]
    - inject host libraries via /opt/eessi/lib + CVMFS variant symlinks [Alan]
        - MPICH toolchain [review Victor]
    - funding [Thomas]
    - flexibility in filesystem layer (CernVM-FS vs S3) + software layer (EasyBuild vs Spack vs ....) + also compat layer (cfr. Nix -> Gentoo move by CC) [Kenneth]
    - proper consortium [Thomas]
    - macOS [Kenneth, Terje]